


Redirect

by destinyofshipwreck



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-08-29 14:48:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16746034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinyofshipwreck/pseuds/destinyofshipwreck
Summary: He sits on the bed next to her, tentatively, only relaxing when she wraps an arm around his shoulders and pulls him half onto her lap. She runs her fingers through his hair and feels his breath on her neck slow to match hers.Fuck only being in pain, she thinks.//One week in Vancouver in February 2010.





	Redirect

It's not a therapist-approved treatment modality, but it still counts as a usefully productive reframing, Tessa imagines, to take the foul mood of pain and deflect it from anger at her own body into anger at other things instead, whether the other things deserve it or not. Good practice for reframing all the rest.

"Hey," she says in a low voice over breakfast in the cafeteria two days before the compulsory dance. 

"Hmm," says Scott, looking up from his eggs.

"Fuck the whole back half of the tango romantica," she whispers.

"Oh?" says Scott.

"Fuck stairs," she adds in an undertone. "Fuck plyometrics, fuck treadmills, and fuck having to sit down to take off my socks."

"Just listing the things that have grievously wronged us?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says. "Fuck having to stand in the shower, fuck having to get our own coffee, fuck—"

"Fuck needing to come downstairs for breakfast, fuck that there's no room service in this fucking hellhole," says Scott.

"That's the spirit," she says. "And fuck the fluorescent lights in here, they're unflattering." Scott looks sallow under them, and she probably looks even worse. She'd caught a glimpse of the stress-induced uneven red patches in her complexion and the dark circles under her eyes on her way out her dorm room door a half-hour ago, and the situation was dire.

Nevertheless, the litany of complaint having arrived at exaggerated vanity, her face must've disclosed a lightening of mood, because his has broken into a wide grin.

"We can get you room service, Virtch," he says. "Anything you want. Your wish is my command. Walnut crunch, sugar in your coffee, sausage McMuffin, you name it."

"Nah, it's the principle of the thing," she says.

The gym is an eight-minute walk from the cafeteria at a hundred steps per minute. No brisker, even if she feels up for it, or she'll regret it later. Scott queues up Dancing Queen on his iPod, tucks it back in his jacket pocket, and solemnly hands her one earbud, and they walk in silence at the pace the song prescribes.

The cafeteria is an eleven and a half-minute walk from the gym at seventy steps per minute.

Scott puts on Good Vibrations for the trip back for lunch, one earbud each, and she grits her teeth the whole distance even after the massage that should've taken more of the edge off than it did, resisting the prospect of a break on the bench at the halfway mark.

She's desperate to sluice off in the bath the frustration of barely being up for even a low-impact workout, but the grim calculus of her energy and ability affords no impulsive changes to her schedule: it's another five minutes past the cafeteria to her room in the dorm, and then eight back. They'd paced off all the distances in the whole complex the day they arrived in Vancouver, from the dorm to the cafeteria, to the shuttle pick-up point, between the dressing rooms and practice ice, the lengths of the halls in the Coliseum, in the guise of exploring. Lunch has to be first.

"You don't have to wait for me," she says to Scott when they've reached the cafeteria. "I mean, go change, you reek. I'll still be here when you're done."

"Sit down and I'll grab you lunch," he says, ignoring her.

She picks through her club sandwich layer by layer, and he watches her in silence, after he's finished his own.

"What," she says. "You're staring."

"Fuck that they don't have omelettes in the afternoon, that's all," he says.

"Ah," she says. "My appetite's fine, if that's what you're worried about. Just tired."

"There's doughnuts," he says, sliding off the end of the bench and getting to his feet. "I'll go grab us some for later."

Fuck being cheered up, she thinks.

When he returns with a dozen doughnuts in a ziploc bag, he doesn't reach for her to help her up from the bench, but he's deliberately close enough that she could grab him if she needed to. Fuck being looked after.

She's more irritable still in the elevator. With no one else in the car with them, he unceremoniously scoops her up into his arms.

"Scott, I swear to god," she says.

When the door opens for her floor, he sticks his head out, casing the hall to make sure no one’s there who could see her not on her own two feet. It’s deserted.

"I'm being practical, since you apparently won't be," he says testily. "Don't waste steps on stuff like this, we'll need them later."

"Don’t be so condescending," she says, kicking him idly in the thigh with her heel.

Her roommate's gym schedule is different from hers, they'd arranged before they even arrived, so they can take staggered uninterrupted naps. The room is Tessa's for another hour.

Scott sets her down on her twin bed, but doesn't leave the room.

"I'm sorry," he says. "For being condescending."

"You weren't," she says. "I'm sorry for being a jerk. We're a partnership, and you're right, we have to be careful, I don't want to sabotage our chances by being a tough guy."

"You are," he says. "Tough, I mean. I don't want you to feel like you have to be tough alone. Let me help you."

"Come over here," she says.

He sits on the bed next to her, tentatively, only relaxing when she wraps an arm around his shoulders and pulls him half onto her lap. She runs her fingers through his hair and feels his breath on her neck slow to match hers.

Fuck only being in pain, she thinks.

It's new, this season, that Scott would sometimes stay the night, as they spent fewer and fewer hours apart each day, as their Olympic focus narrowed and narrowed further. It's new, this season, that when she's in the most pain she can only talk to him, only wants to be around him. It's new that she's starting to trust that he might not just disappear again.

She still feels uncertain of her welcome when she tugs his hair to bring his lips up to hers, but he lets her part his lips with her tongue, takes her lower lip between his teeth, bears her backwards on the bed, pulls his sweatshirt off at her insistence, presses his growing erection against her crotch, gasps when she hitches her legs around his hips and tugs him closer.

Rearranging them, he slides his fingers under the waistband of her sweatpants and pulls them off, her underwear too, and then his own sweats, and her socks, with exaggerated care around her ankles that makes her laugh; then he's back on top of her and swallowing her laughter in a fierce kiss, and she's wrapping herself around him, and he's sinking into her, setting a languid pace with the rocking of his hips.

No weightbearing, she observes. He's being so cautious with her legs, like even touching them will be too much.

Supporting his weight with one arm, keeping it off her, he brings the other hand between them and finds her clit with a fingertip, wet from her, and she surrenders herself to it, too gentle or no. When the full-body wave of tension and release hits her calves, her toes pointed involuntarily, the sudden jolt of intensified pain nearly makes her pass out.

"It's just us," says Scott a few minutes later. He's pulled her on top of him; there's not enough room in the narrow bed for both of them side by side, and he's stroking her hair with sticky fingers.

"Just us," she repeats, still willing herself to breathe through the cramp.

Tessa's pace falters momentarily on the walk to the gym the next morning, and Scott grabs her elbow at once, not to support her but to stop her, digging out the iPod to pause it.

"Hang on," he says, scrolling through the library. "Try this."

"Livin' la Vida Loca," she says a few bars in. "What decade do you think this is?"

"Fuck being ungrateful about classics from the nineties," he says. It's nine minutes to the gym, so they aren't even late, but she doesn't falter again.

The walk back is not quite fifteen minutes, or three runs through a whiny indie pop song she's heard before on the radio but doesn't know the name of, a sedate pace, only a little faster than her resting heart rate.

Scott leaves his jacket with the iPod in the pocket at the table with her when he leaves to get sandwiches, and she snoops: he's got a whole pile of playlists, a strange array of pop and rock, no country, and they're organized by beats per minute, from sixty to a hundred and forty. She stuffs it back in his pocket and glances at the lunch line to make sure he didn't see, but he's deep in conversation with Patrick, not looking her way.

Only the strength of her focus keeps her upright at all during their compulsory dance, and they perform it perfectly.

"I feel like it might take me a while to stand up again if I've been sitting down," she murmurs to him once they're showered and changed from their tango costumes into street clothes, barely audible over the hum of the crowd waiting for the shuttle back to the village. "So for dinner maybe we could—"

"Taxi stand's up the street," he murmurs back, and leads her there, within arm's reach in case she stumbles, but not touching, carrying both of their bags.

Scott picks a White Spot in Burnaby from the cab, seventy dollars away.

"Last place anyone will look," he says to her curious glance. The restaurant is empty, no bar and no TV, and the hostess doesn't seem to know who they are: just a pair of kids in Team Canada souvenir jackets out for an early hamburger.

It's a luxury to be able to prop her feet up on a chair across the table from her unnoticed, and she revels in it, leaning against Scott, half tucked into his unzipped jacket, nearly falling asleep until their meal arrives. It's more luxurious still to not have to camouflage her limp on the way to the bathroom. Scott pays for both of them, but she tips the waitress with every last twenty in her wallet.

They have a free couple of hours the next day, a day without competition, and they spend them together outside on the seawall.

"Fuck it," she says conversationally, "that the weather is so mild. This would be spring in Ontario, everyone from here is a wimp."

"You got that right," he says.

"Mostly," she adds, "fuck that there's no ice on the sidewalks, so we don't have a reason to be walking so slow. Fuck that person who's watching us."

She gestures toward her two o'clock where there's a woman looking in their direction, overdressed for the temperature in a long wool peacoat, leather gloves, and fur hat.

"Fuck being noticed," says Scott. "We're going for a stroll to relax and unwind, there's nothing suspicious about it."

He nods to the woman, who looks from up close like she may not have recognized them after all; she nods back only like someone would to a stranger.

Scott's roommate is out for dinner with his family the following evening after the original dance, and Scott half-drags her, half-carries her to his room, pressing her back against the door as soon as it clicks shut behind them, mumbling how proud he is of her into her neck as she wraps her legs around his waist, her head thrown back.  The sharp edge of the peephole digs into her scalp, and pulls strands of her hair out of her chignon.

When he sinks to his knees in front of her, it's with both hands cupped around her ass, half-lifting her off her feet, her hands on his shoulders for balance. He shoves her skirt up her hips and yanks her thong to the side, and then his mouth is on her.

"Your fingers," she gasps.

He's still mumbling endearments into her as he works her with his tongue, but he gives her what she asked, releasing her with one hand, first one exploratory finger and then two to the last knuckle, fingertips crooked back toward himself.

She doesn’t know what she wants more: to feel the building ache of standing under her own weight, or the building orgasm, but together they reach a crescendo.

She can't tell if she loses her footing—grabbing Scott's hair to keep from falling over, relying on his free hand on her hip pressing her hard against the door—because her knees buckled or her calves gave out.

It's still undecidable when he carries her to the bed and lays her on her side, climbing in behind her, planting soft open-mouthed kisses on the back of her neck, his erection pressing against her ass through his jeans.

She turns to kiss her own taste from his mouth once she’s caught her breath, reaching for his cock, but he pulls back, propping himself up on one elbow.

"So," he says in a tone that's dangerously light. "Was that anaesthesia, or self-harm."

"Fuck pillow talk, am I right," she says. "Cut straight to the chase."

"I know you don't want to talk about it, but I need to know," he says. "If you're just using this as an excuse, just to hurt yourself, then I don't want to—"

"If you want to stop fucking around with me, just say it, but can it not wait until we're done tomorrow," she says.

Scott's expression is searching, and it doesn't give her a sense of what he wants from her.

"Just wait," she adds, trying to soften her voice. “Please.”

He's only ever worried about her, and it's not worth being annoyed about, she reminds herself. Fuck concern, but fuck distraction more.

"Okay," he says. "I just—we put so much work into this, our relationship, after I fucked it up—"

"You didn't," she says.

"And I want you to be able to trust me, and I want to be able to trust you not to hurt yourself because of me," he finishes.

"Can it wait," she says, and she sounds more forlorn than she means to.

"Can you stay," he says.

She nods, and he finally relaxes, laying back so she can rest her head on his chest, and she’s asleep in minutes.

Afterward she'll have no recollection of the free dance, her memory not even jogged by watching videos of it, which she does with neurotic fascination. How perfectly she must have lived in the moment, that it will never be accessible to her again.

"Fuck podiums," she whispers in his ear after he helps her up, one hand cupped over her mouth so no one can see. "Fuck that everyone else doesn't get, like, lowered below the ice instead, fuck making us have to climb up here."

"Fuck that they don't wheel a throne out for this part," he whispers back.

She can feel the strain of compensating for the instability below her knees all the way up her quads, the length of the posterior chain to her shoulders, the full array of muscles across her abdomen tense with the effort of balance, and as the absurdity of the situation sinks in, she laughs so hard she cries.

They let it wait until the next morning, after a late breakfast, over another walk along the seawall. She lasts half a kilometre before she needs a break.

Scott came prepared with a thermos of black coffee and four cherry danishes from the cafeteria in his backpack, which he sets on the bench between them.

"Fuck that the surgery didn’t fix everything," she says, finally. He looks at her, but doesn't say anything, just pours coffee into the stainless steel lid and hands it to her. It's hazelnut-flavoured and so sweet she almost can't stand it.

"Spring of physio after Worlds, obviously," she says. "But what if it doesn't work."

"Fuck it if it doesn't," he says. "We'll figure it out."

She takes a danish and eats half of it in a couple of enormous bites. It's stale, and the pastry flakes apart down the front of her coat, where Scott brushes it away.

"Fuck always having problems to figure out," she says. "And fuck that this danish is from yesterday."

"Fuck not being able to enjoy our own successes for five minutes because there's so much to work on next," he says.

She hands him the other half of the danish and he crams the whole thing in his mouth.

"Fuck that you can't help me with this part," she says, while he's indisposed. "It's so dumb, I feel so guilty that you always have to wait for me, I hate that you feel like you have to look after me."

He swallows hard.

"Yeah, but there's nowhere else I can imagine wanting to be," he says, voice thick. "Standing around and feeling useless, but together."

She takes another swig of the coffee; it's vile.

"Fuck this," she says, wincing. "Where did you even get it from."

"Welcome basket," he says. "Speaking of which, fuck those too."

She screws the lid back onto the thermos and tucks it back into the backpack with the danishes, and they stand up together.

"I think everyone will be up and around," she says. "If you wanna go back and be sociable today."

"Not to sound ungrateful, but fuck everyone except us," he says. "I told Chiddy not to expect me back before tonight. Let's walk."

"And not walk," she says.

"As much as you need," he says.

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Redirect](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17404376) by [Annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods)




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